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JPEG Patent Challenged
ChocLinux writes "The Public Patent Foundation has filed a request at the US Patent Office to revoke Compression Labs' data compression patent, which it is reportedly using to harrass anyone that implements the JPEG format. 'CLI's aggressive assertion of the '672 patent is causing substantial public harm by threatening this international standard on which the public relies,' says Pubpat in its filing."
then beware of geeks bearing GIFs.
Who wasted time chasing this while nearly putting themselves out of business. How about focusing on some real products???
Get this patent overturned. It's extremely important to get these ridiculous technology stifling unoriginal patents overturned.
Where the hell is EFF on this? Pubpatents is getting my money this year and I recommend you guys donate there as well if you are into donating to tech freedom.
... was the prior art in JPEG format?
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Is it possible that if JPEG patents were enforced we would actually persue the use a PNG (a significantly better format). As a web developer, if I could rely on people being able to see all the different derivations of PNG, life and design would be much easier.
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
This is covered in details over at Groklaw
Help fight continental drift.
Gee, where have I seen that before?
Um...did you even read the wikipedia article you referenced?
From your post:
Unlike JPEGs, PNGs can be lossless
And from the article:
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless bitmap image format.
By saying PNGs can be lossless, you imply they can be lossy as well...which is not what they were designed for.
From your post:
Sure, they tend to be a bit larger than JPEGs, but I figure the gain in quality is often worth it.
And from the article:
Using PNG instead of a high quality JPEG for such images would result in a large increase in filesize (often 5-10 times) with negligible gain in quality.
And finally, from the article:
PNG was not intended to replace the other popular web image format JPEG.
PNG is intended as a replacement for GIF, not JPG.
Hope this clears things up.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Here's what. What happens when someone claims rights on PNG too after everyone starts using it? What we have happening here is the patent board is unable to understand prior art and granting patents on obvious and pre-existing technology.
The issue is not this particular patent, but the issue is blocking other corporations and lawyer clusters from trying to gain broadly worded patents that incorporate pre existing technology from obscure sources so they can make money.
This is dumb, and some would argue anti-competetive monopolistic behaviour. You have a patent on something cool. You let people use it without any royalties; it becomes popular. Really popular. Then, all of a sudden, you start charging royalties, and everyone is trapped. It would not have become that popular if royalties had been there in the first place.
This is reminiscent of two things: Microsoft (slightly different modus operandi), and drug dealers (the first one's free kiddies).
Should be that if you don't enforce your patent within a reasonable time frame, you lose the right to do so. In a perfect world. Which we are far, far, away from.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
The problem is most good image codecs are a patent mindfield [e.g. wavelets]. You can still do things like 5/9 [or whatever] and then typical entropy encoding. I think ... not 100% on top of the graphics scene.
Though a simple Haar wavelet can be effective [and with a tweak lossless].
Actually you can perform bincoding and/or lifting to most domain transforms [e.g. DCT] and wavelet based codecs to get a transform that works with integers only and can be lossless. The "bindct" papers of a few years ago are a good example. They showed how to do DCT type IV [i think, whatever JPEG uses] using only integer transforms [shifts,adds,subs] that got coding gains close to the traditional DCT.
For raster images PNG is as good as it gets at the moment. You could do a block sorting codec to get a slight better compression ratio but not by much [and it wouldn't be good for progressive images].
As for truecolour images there really isn't much unfortunately.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you read the pubpatent filing, their main point is that an earlier patent, issued to the same company, is prior art for all the points in the '672' patent. The earlier patent was filed more than a year (plus one month) prior to the filing of the '672' patent, which makes it legally prior art.
Anyway, the sucker has less than a year to run, as it was filed in October, 1986. Probably why the lampreys at Forgent are pushing so aggressively. It'll only be a cash cow for another 11 months.
Interestingly, I could have been a target of Unisys, except they couldn't have gotten much blood from this stone. I was the original author of the "compress" program, which turned into an early "open source" effort (although the term hadn't been invented at the time). Compress was an implementation of LZW, based on Welch's 1984 paper in Computer. Only later was I informed that it was patented. After it had been incorporated into Berkeley Unix releases and into the GIF format. I was happy when that patent finally expired, but I had absolutely no doubt of its legitimacy.
As for the claimed superiority of PNG over JPEG, I'd say it depends on the application. JPEG was designed precisely and specifically for the purpose of compressing photographic images. Such images
- Do not compress well using techniques like LZW and Huffman coding
- Have intrinsic variation in pixel values due to noise in the recording process
- Don't have precisely straight and sharp edges
These characteristics make them poorly suited to lossless compression techniques, and also mean that a lossy technique will not degrade the image further than the original noisy recording method did. (Unless you turn up the loss level too high.)Because of the "if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" principle, people have used JPEG in applications that it's not suited for -- applications where the lossy compression DOES degrade the image quality, and where a different method (LZW, for example) would in fact give a smaller file. Then other people point at these examples and say "PNG (or GIF) is better than JPEG!" My toolbox has hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, etc. I try to pick the appropriate tool, and don't hammer with a wrench, for example. The same should be true of our computer tools.
We've seen this before.
When RSA got popular and people realized that it was patented, there was a large effort to switch to DSA. Right about the time that all the pieces of DSA support were in place, the RSA patent expired so people just kept using RSA.
When GIF got popular and people realized that LZW was patented, PNG was created. By the time PNG was actually supported more-or-less correctly in browsers, the LZW patent expired.
I suspect if this JPEG madness keeps up, people will try to switch to JPEG 2000 (which is still patented, but at least the patent holders appear friendly). But it looks like the JPEG patent expires around 2007, which does not leave enough time to switch to anything.
Real products are a distraction for these people. Forgent got millions out of various companies without developing anything. Since the legal fees (costs) are much less than the licensing revenue, it's a self-perpetuating system. The RIAA settlements are the same way; each settlement pays for N new lawsuits to be filed and the profit rises exponentially.
They have already been challaged by many, but for the first time someone has a concrete case with 'prior art'. You can read more on this at The Data Compression News Blog
White Knight Charges Forgent http://www.c10n.info/archives/246
[Disclaimer: Shameless self promotion]